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Richmond GreenbriarAPOLLO: GOD OF MUSIC AND LIGHTOne Easter our neighbors the Beerys hosted a party for the whole block. Each family received a tiny baby chicken as party favor. The chicks were dyed like Easter eggs--some pink, some green, some yellow, some blue. ...others were crushed by the tires of passing cars... Ours was pink. Mom bathed it in the kitchen sink, but the color was fast.In the weeks it took for the downy pink feathers to grow out, all of the other chicks died. Some were devoured by the neighbor’s cats and dogs. Others were crushed by the tires of passing cars. The saddest cases were also the most common: the chicks that simply gave up the ghost, cold and forlorn in the suburban midnight. Our chick alone struggled through its traumatic, day-glow infancy. Mom would hold it to her breast, loving it as fiercely as she did my brothers and me. She fed it crumbs of wholegrain bread and wiped up its waste with paper towels. It spent the night in the kitchen, secure beneath an upturned laundry basket. This chick would not be a casualty of negligence.  It grew, and eventually, fleshy, red protrusions appeared between the feathers on its head. Our chick was a rooster, and he needed a name. At the time, I was enchanted by a book called D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. Mom and Dad read me the stories before bed, and I pored over the illustrations in the daytime. We decided to name our rooster Apollo, after the god of music and light. I thought this was because of his radiant white feathers, but looking back, I’m sure Mom had something more acerbic in mind. Apollo, quite naturally and without any training, sang an ancient hymn to the sun every morning at daybreak. And he sang with gusto. The neighbors heard him in their beds and wondered: “Why couldn’t he have died like all the rest?” He was the conscience of our block, persistent and indomitable. I considered his predawn crowing a sort of revenge. It was an affirmation of life and compassion—an indictment of the neighbors who let their chicks die, and of the Beerys, who, in giving away the colored chicks as party favors, showed an awful callousness. That Easter party exemplified the cruel tyranny of cuteness. Apollo’s matinal crowing was a refutation of all that—superficiality, philistinism, and kitsch—in favor of commitedness, love, and reality, qualities somewhat lacking in the suburbs. (The next-door neighbor’s kid, Jake Barrymore, whose turquoise chick was “accidentally” flushed down the toilet, asked me if we named our rooster after Apollo Creed, from the movie Rocky.) When he was big enough (and his claws sharp enough) to discourage prowling cats, Apollo moved out to the backyard. There he reigned for many years, an absolute monarch, exacting his tribute from the slugs, bugs and earthworms of his domain. Every morning, after releasing him from his laundry basket in the pantry, Mom threw him a few slices of wholegrain bread and that was that. He was perfectly happy in his simple life (although I wonder if he ever felt the lack of female companionship). I was terrified of him and he knew it. He often punished me with sharp swipes from his claws for presuming too much familiarity. Once, when I exhausted my big brother’s patience, he carried me out to the backyard and locked me in with Apollo. I begged him desperately to open the gate in the surrounding wall. He held it shut, looking down at me with unyielding contempt. Weeping and wailing, I pleaded with him, with the neighborhood kids gathered there, and finding no mercy, resigned myself to the inevitable approach of the winged monster. The kids laughed and jeered but I saw the fear in their eyes. They were as terrified of Apollo as I was. Years later we moved to a smaller house where Mom thought the yard would be too small for Apollo. She had him put down a few days before the move. When she told me, we were standing on the backyard porch, where Apollo ate his wholegrain breakfast. It was a shock, a sickening disillusionment. Santa Claus wasn’t for real, and Mom had killed Apollo. She said she was holding him when he died, and he didn’t feel any pain, but those facts seemed woefully beside the point. I felt betrayed—we were no more loving than the neighbors after all. In the end, Apollo had met the same fate as the other chicks. ...we had both failed Apollo in different ways... Looking back, I see that I had little right to criticize Mom’s decision. She had devoted years of attention to Apollo. She—and nobody else—had cared for him, from the shameful beginning to the gentle end. By the time we moved, I was old enough to have cared for Apollo myself. Maybe if I had shown some responsibility, taken the initiative, put my love into action, Mom would have let me take Apollo with us to our new home. We both failed him, in our separate ways. She was tired of his early music, didn’t want to upset our new neighbors, and didn’t want his shit to stain her new, wood floors. I was too preoccupied with school and adolescent narcissism to see that the light he brought to our lives was more important than getting an extra ten minutes of sleep in the morning or watching the latest music video at night. Mom finally decided that she couldn’t be responsible for Apollo anymore, and I was too immature to take over for her.Now I realize that the end didn’t matter so much as the years of light and music leading up to it. Apollo enriched my life immeasurably, and taught me that we only stand to gain by respecting life, nurturing it, cherishing it. If Mom hadn’t cared for Apollo all those years, if she had let him waste away like his poor Easter party companions, how diminished my childhood would have been! And I’d never even know it. Richmond Greenbriar grew up in Houston, Texas. You can see more of his chicken scratch here Photographer E. Vanderleelie lives in a farm in Ontario, with the above chicken. 7:53 PM - 25/5/2006 - post comment
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